FLUXUS ABC a Selection Curated by Henar Rivière

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

FLUXUS ABC a Selection Curated by Henar Rivière GALERIE KRINZINGER SEILERSTÄTTE 16 1010 WIEN TEL +43 1 513 30 06 FAX +43 1 513 30 06 33 [email protected] galerie-krinzinger.at FLUXUS ABC A selection curated by Henar Rivière Eric Anderson, A-Yo, George Brecht, Giuseppe Chiari, Philip Corner, Robert Filliou, Ken Friedman, Al Hansen, Detlev Hartmann, Dick Higgins, Alice Hutchins, Joe Jones, Milan Knížak, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Jonas Mekas, Peter Moore, Charlotte Mooreman, Yoko Ono, Robin Page, Nam June Paik, Ben Patterson, Willem De Ridder, Carolee Schneemann, Paul Sharits, Mieko Shiomi, Daniel Spoerri, Ben Vautier, Yoshi Wada, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams and others opening: December 17, 2020, 7pm duration: December 18, 2019 - February 14, 2020 opening speach by Henar Rivière Art historian, Madrid / Vienna Almost 60 years have passed since Fluxus was born in Wiesbaden in 1962. “Until then, what is known as Fluxus today didn't know what it was”. To this statement by Fluxus artist Ben Patterson one should add that also after 1962 (especially after!) a strong and long-lasting controversy over what Fluxus actually was. A firm avant-garde group for some, a rather vague attitude towards life and art for others – Fluxus just did not want to be defined unilaterally. It is precisely this controversy, guided by the artists themselves, that illuminates the nature of Fluxus as an experimental artistic tendency, which opened up new paths for the social organization and aesthetic development of the arts. At a time when the former strategies of the historical avant-garde were being revised, Fluxus emerged as the first international artist network of postmodernism under its own name. As far as the aesthetic level is concerned, the Fluxus artists created an intermedial art that allowed new art practices, such as Action Art and Conceptual Art, to emerge from music. With Fluxus ABC, Galerie Krinzinger offers an insight into the diverse world of Fluxus, where one art form leads into the other. The first part of the exhibition is devoted to the broad field of Fluxus music, through a selection of works ranging from action art to new musical instruments and from scores to experimental poetry. This leads to the second part of the exhibition, which deals with the purely conceptual level of the Fluxus games, in which research and experiments as well as jokes and designs find their place. Finally, a third part of the exhibition shows Fluxus printed matter: diagrams, magazines, leaflets, posters, invitation cards, etc. These original documents provide interesting information about historical facts, but above all they bear witness to the important role that publishing activity in the history of Fluxus played. Since the 1970s exhibitions about Fluxus also became part of this history, including the Fluxus Subject, organized by Galerie Krinzinger in 1990. We would also like to pay tribute to these landmarks of the history of Fluxus with the current exhibition. Henar Rivière .
Recommended publications
  • Archive Fluxus Heidelberg Center BLOG 2009 06 01
    Fluxus Heidelberg Center BLOG: June 2009 pagina 1 van 10 BLOG ZOEKEN BLOG MARKEREN Volgende blog» Blog maken | Aanmelden Fluxus Heidelberg Center BLOG This BLOG is maintained by the FLUXUS HEIDELBERG CENTER. See: WWW.FLUXUSHEIDELBERG.ORG. This FHC BLOG will contain an overview of all news we find and get in connection to Fluxus. Articles, publications, events, celebrations, Biographies, you name it. Every month the collection of the blog will be published on the FHC website as a digital archive THURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2009 Contributors Something Else Press: Exploring the Ways and Means of Communication Litsa Spathi / Nobody Litsa Spathi Ruud Janssen By Steve Clay Fluxus Tomato Fluxus Heidelberg Center Designed, edited and produced by Dick Higgins, Something Else Press books contain offbeat and avant-garde writing in a neat and tidy yet quirky and distinctive form. The Press began in 1964 following Higgins’s break with Links Fluxus founder George Maciunas, and embodied the many of the concerns Fluxus Heidelberg Center which identified the then nascent art movement. Fluxus Heidelberg Center Videos Fluxlist Europe Early titles include Jefferson’s Birthday/Postface (1964), Higgins’s collection Fluxlist BLOG of performance scores about which the jacket copy reads: ‘Jefferson’s Litsa Spathi's Site Birthday consists of all the things Dick Higgins wrote, composed or invented Litsa Spathi's BLOG between April 13th, 1962 and April 13th 1963 inclusive, on the assumption Litsa Spathi's Portfolio that the bad work one does is just as valid as the interesting work. So some IUOMA Site is lousy. So? Some is terrific. Hurrah for the Irish! And hurrah for Thomas Ruud Janssen's TAM & IUOMA Blog Jefferson! And Daniel Webster too!’ Jefferson’s Birthday was produced Fluxus Blog back-to-back with Postface, Higgins’s account of the background and Tomato Times Blog beginning of Fluxus.
    [Show full text]
  • “The Lunatics Are on the Loose...” NIKOLAJ KUNSTHAL November 3 - November 25 2012
    “THE LUNATICS ARE ON THE LOOSE...” NIKOLAJ KUNSTHAL November 3 - November 25 2012 50 years ago, Nikolaj, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, provided the setting for some of the very first Fluxus concerts. To celebrate this occasion, a three-week Fluxus mini festival will take place, built around an interactive archive of more than 480 performances. The Lunatics Are on the Loose... presents 480 performances by 120 different artists, taking place at European Fluxus concerts 1962-1977. The archive features a multitude of sources from scores and photos to sound recordings and film clips to contemporary eyewitness reports. At the Nikolaj-exhibition, guests enter an interactive forest of Fluxus-performances. Each perfor- mance is presented on a separate card, hanging in a string from the ceiling. With this as the point of entry, one can embark on a journey in time and place and seek out artists grouped according to where each particular event took place during the particular year. Each card offers additional infor- mation about artists, score (if known) photos and/or description (if known) along with a digital code. Using an iPad to scan the code, one can move deeper down into the archive, getting more informa- tion on the performance in question and learn what else took place at the concert as well as more about the artist(s). Mini festival Apart from the interactive archive, there will be Fluxus film screenings, the opportunity to listen to avant-garde composed music of the 1960s and earlier, as well as a curator talk on Fluxus and its importance for today’s contemporary art.
    [Show full text]
  • Major Exhibition Poses Tough Questions and Reasserts Fluxus Attitude
    Contact: Alyson Cluck 212/998-6782 or [email protected] Major Exhibition Poses Tough Questions And Reasserts Fluxus Attitude Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life and Fluxus at NYU: Before and Beyond open at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery on September 9, 2011 New York City (July 21, 2011)—On view from September 9 through December 3, 2011, at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life features over 100 works dating primarily from the 1960s and ’70s by artists such as George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Ken Friedman, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, and La Monte Young. Curated by art historian Jacquelynn Baas and organized by Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art, the exhibition draws heavily on the Hood’s George Maciunas Memorial Collection, and includes art objects, documents, videos, event scores, and Fluxkits. Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life is accompanied by a second installation, Fluxus at NYU: Before and Beyond, in the Grey’s Lower Level Gallery. Fluxus—which began in the 1960s as an international network of artists, composers, and designers―resists categorization as an art movement, collective, or group. It also defies traditional geographical, chronological, and medium-based approaches. Instead, Fluxus participants employ a “do-it-yourself” attitude, relating their activities to everyday life and to viewers’ experiences, often blurring the boundaries between art and life. Offering a fresh look at Fluxus, the show and its installation are George Maciunas, Burglary Fluxkit, 1971. Hood designed to spark multiple interpretations, exploring Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, George Maciunas Memorial Collection: Gift of the Friedman Family; the works’ relationships to key themes of human GM.986.80.164.
    [Show full text]
  • Chelsea Space for IMMEDIATE RELEASE
    PRESS RELEASE Chelsea Space FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ORGASMIC STREAMING ORGANIC GARDENING ELECTROCULTURE Beatrice Gibson, Alison Knowles, Ghislaine Leung, Annea Lockwood, Claire Potter, Charlotte Prodger, Carolee Schneemann, Tai Shani, Mieko Shiomi Private view: Tuesday 24 April, 6-8.30pm Exhibition continues: 25 April – 25 May 2018 Touching, performance with microphone and script fragments, 2016. Claire Potter. Image courtesy of the artist. ORGASMIC STREAMING ORGANIC GARDENING ELECTROCULTURE is a group exhibition looking at practices that emerge between text and performance, the page and the body, combining a display and events programme of historical and contemporary works. Newly commissioned and existing works will intersect with an array of archival material located in Carolee Schneemann's Parts of a Body House [1968-1972], from which the exhibition title derives, and Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood's score anthology Womens Work [1975- 8]. ORGASMIC STREAMING ORGANIC GARDENING ELECTROCULTURE seeks an alternative framework to look at the influence of conceptual procedures as well as experimental writing within contemporary feminist performance practices across visual art, sound and text. The exhibition seeks to highlight these significant trans- historical sensibilities, whilst acknowledging their disjuncts. Each artist brings a particular method, procedure or interrogation to the act of writing or performing text, blurring descriptions such as text, score, work, performance, version and iteration. ORGASMIC STREAMING ORGANIC GARDENING ELECTROCULTURE’s exhibition display is accompanied by a day of live performance, a workshop, a publication and an affiliated symposium to take place in May 2018. Curated by Karen Di Franco and Irene Revell. Chelsea Space Chelsea College of Arts 16 John Islip Street, London, SW1P 4JU www.chelseaspace.org PRESS RELEASE Chelsea Space FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Parts of a Body House is a score, a document and a piece of speculative fiction, written by Carolee Schneemann between 1957-68.
    [Show full text]
  • Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York 06/28/2007 06:25 PM
    Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York 06/28/2007 06:25 PM critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies published by the College Art Association June 27, 2007 Midori Yoshimoto Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005. 248 pp.; 76 b/w ills. Paper $29.95 (0813535212) Kevin Concannon In the context of today’s increasingly global art world, Midori Yoshimoto’s excellent and timely study, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York, fills a lacuna in the history of Japanese art in the West as well as in the history of the avant-garde more generally. Into Performance offers fascinating insight into the period between the Zen appropriations of Western artists in the 1950s and the identity art that reigned in the 1980s and 1990s, now so frequently subsumed under the more neutral (or, as some argue, neutralizing) rubric of globalism. The five Japanese women artists who are the subjects of Yoshimoto’s text—Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, and Shigeko Kubota—left Japan to pursue careers in New York City in the late 1950s and early1960s. Yet ultimately, each found herself marginalized—on the fringes of both Japanese and Western societies. Indeed they were the first generation of Japanese women artists to work outside Japan. Neither Japanese-American nor regarded as wholly Japanese by their compatriots, they occupied positions now not uncommon, but novel at the time. While Kusama and Ono have been subjects of substantial English-language monographs in recent years, Saito and Shiomi are considered almost exclusively within the context of their Fluxus affiliations.
    [Show full text]
  • Key: * Organized by the Wexner Center + New Work Commissions/Residencies ♦ Catalogue Published by WCA ● Gallery Guide
    1 Wexner Center for the Arts Exhibition History Key: * Organized by the Wexner Center + New Work Commissions/Residencies ♦ Catalogue published by WCA ● Gallery Guide ●LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze February 1 – August 16, 2020 (END DATE TO BE MODIFIED DUE TO COVID-19) *+●Sadie Benning: Pain Thing February 1 – August 16, 2020 (END DATE TO BE MODIFIED DUE TO COVID-19) *+●Stanya Kahn: No Go Backs January 22 – August 16, 2020 (END DATE TO BE MODIFIED DUE TO COVID-19) *+●HERE: Ann Hamilton, Jenny Holzer, Maya Lin September 21 – December 29, 2019 *+●Barbara Hammer: In This Body (F/V Residency Award) June 1 – August 11, 2019 *Cecilia Vicuña: Lo Precario/The Precarious June 1 – August 11, 2019 Jason Moran June 1 – August 11, 2019 *+●Alicia McCarthy: No Straight Lines February 2 – August 1, 2019 John Waters: Indecent Exposure February 2 – April 28, 2019 Peter Hujar: Speed of Life February 2 – April 28, 2019 *+♦Mickalene Thomas: I Can’t See You Without Me (Visual Arts Residency Award) September 14 –December 30, 2018 *● Inherent Structure May 19 – August 12, 2018 Richard Aldrich Zachary Armstrong Key: * Organized by the Wexner Center ♦ Catalogue published by WCA + New Work Commissions/Residencies ● Gallery Guide Updated July 2, 2020 2 Kevin Beasley Sam Moyer Sam Gilliam Angel Otero Channing Hansen Laura Owens Arturo Herrera Ruth Root Eric N. Mack Thomas Scheibitz Rebecca Morris Amy Sillman Carrie Moyer Stanley Whitney *+●Anita Witek: Clip February 3-May 6, 2018 *●William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time February 3-April 15, 2018 All of Everything: Todd Oldham Fashion February 3-April 15, 2018 Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life September 16-December 31, 2017 *+●Gray Matters May 20, 2017–July 30 2017 Tauba Auerbach Cristina Iglesias Erin Shirreff Carol Bove Jennie C.
    [Show full text]
  • Heather La Bash, Thesis 2008, Published Version
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by KU ScholarWorks YOKO ONO: TRANSNATIONAL ARTIST IN A WORLD OF STICKINESS BY C2008 Heather La Bash Submitted to the graduate degree program in American Studies and the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master’s of Arts _Iris Smith Fischer _________________ Chairperson _Saralyn Reece Hardy ______________ _Gitti Salami ______________________ Date defended _August 24 th , 2007 ___________ The Thesis Committee for Heather La Bash certifies That this is the approved Version of the following thesis: YOKO ONO: TRANSNATIONAL ARTIST IN A WORLD OF STICKINESS Committee: _Iris Smith Fischer _________________ Chairperson _Saralyn Reece Hardy _______________ _Gitti Salami ______________________ Date Approved _July 21, 2008 __________ ii Contents Introduction Yoko Ono, Transnational Artist in a World of Stickiness 2 Chapter One Japanese in America, American in Japan 22 Chapter Two Pay Attention, Play, & Dismantle 45 Chapter Three Communitas in Transnationalism 69 Conclusion 92 List of Illustrations 97 Works Cited 98 1 Introduction Yoko Ono: Transnational Artist in a World of Stickiness Drinking Piece for Orchestra Imagine letting a goldfish swim across the sky. Let it swim from the West to the East. Drink a liter of water. Imagine letting a goldfish swim across the sky. Let it swim from the East to the West. 1963 spring This paper explores the role of transnationalism in the life and work of Yoko Ono, from 1954 to 1967. I argue that Ono’s hybrid Japanese and American identity affected the acceptance of her person within the New York based branch of the avant- garde art group Fluxus, and affected the reception of her work in Japan.
    [Show full text]
  • Heike Roms, Drama, University of Exeter When Fluxus Came to West
    ORE Open Research Exeter TITLE When Fluxus Came to West Wales: A re-search in 12 actions – or, does a network have a margin? AUTHORS Roms, H JOURNAL Performance Research DEPOSITED IN ORE 20 December 2018 This version available at http://hdl.handle.net/10871/35236 COPYRIGHT AND REUSE Open Research Exeter makes this work available in accordance with publisher policies. A NOTE ON VERSIONS The version presented here may differ from the published version. If citing, you are advised to consult the published version for pagination, volume/issue and date of publication Heike Roms, Drama, University of Exeter When Fluxus Came to West Wales: A re-search in 12 actions—or, does a network have a margin? Published in: Performance Research 23:4 (Special Issue: On Reflection – Turning 100), June/July/August 2018, 382-8 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2017.1374641 © Heike Roms 2018 VERSION: Author’s accepted manuscript, September 2018; deposited 19.12.2018 2007. Leafing through Imaging Wales, a book on contemporary Welsh art, I come across the following lines: ‘Visual performance has always been Very strong in Wales. It is not generally known that Fluxus eVents occurred and that there was a Fluxus FestiVal in Aberystwyth…’ (Adams 2003: 27). What’s Welsh for performance art? For more than a decade I have been charting the emergence and early deVelopment in the 1960s and 1970s of those art practices we have come to call—with a catch-all term—performance art: Happenings, Fluxus eVents, destruction art, action art, body art and others like them.
    [Show full text]
  • Fluxus: the Is Gnificant Role of Female Artists Megan Butcher
    Pace University DigitalCommons@Pace Honors College Theses Pforzheimer Honors College Summer 7-2018 Fluxus: The iS gnificant Role of Female Artists Megan Butcher Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/honorscollege_theses Part of the Contemporary Art Commons, and the Other History Commons Recommended Citation Butcher, Megan, "Fluxus: The iS gnificant Role of Female Artists" (2018). Honors College Theses. 178. https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/honorscollege_theses/178 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Pforzheimer Honors College at DigitalCommons@Pace. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors College Theses by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Pace. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract The Fluxus movement of the 1960s and early 1970s laid the groundwork for future female artists and performance art as a medium. However, throughout my research, I have found that while there is evidence that female artists played an important role in this art movement, they were often not written about or credited for their contributions. Literature on the subject is also quite limited. Many books and journals only mention the more prominent female artists of Fluxus, leaving the lesser-known female artists difficult to research. The lack of scholarly discussion has led to the inaccurate documentation of the development of Fluxus art and how it influenced later movements. Additionally, the absence of research suggests that female artists’ work was less important and, consequently, keeps their efforts and achievements unknown. It can be demonstrated that works of art created by little-known female artists later influenced more prominent artists, but the original works have gone unacknowledged.
    [Show full text]
  • Mail Art News
    MAIL ART NEWS 2000 artists postcards in 2000 days, one by one Rubberstamp Box Sets at Stamp Art Gailery, 466 8th handmade in a rich variety of themes and techniques by St., San Francisco, CA during September and October Angela and Peter Netmail and mailed out during the last 1997. Included are works by Alison Knowles, Peter 2000 days of this millenium equals a unique project of Moore, Eric Andersen, Jeff Berner, Ken Friedman, mail as art In the long tradition of artists postcards which Geoffrey Hendrich, Takako Saito, and Mieko Shiomi started soon after the invention of the "correspondence among others. card" over 100 years ago. This includes lots of networking events and homages to other mail artists. Harald Vlugt: Hotel Europa was displayed at the The collection was shown for the first time in Holland as Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam from 30 June - 24 an "exhibition in progress" with a new add-to daily. The August, showing the installation of the map of Europe, Netmails are looking for more exhibition sites. Please divided in 1092 parts, from which 715 pieces were let them know if you are interested in showing this mailed through Europe and "returned to sender." He singular collection. Mail to Angela & Peter Netmail, painted the sea blue, the land green, and then pasted the P.O. Box 2644. D-32383 Minden, Germany. 1,000 rectangles onto large envelopes. He addressed these with his own name, care of Hotel Europe, in 715 New York Correspondence School, a survey of the different towns or cities appearing as red dots on the beginnings of the mail arat movement, including work segment of the map featured on each envelope.
    [Show full text]
  • Introducing Japanese Cinema Expanded by Go Hirasawa, January 2020
    Introducing Japanese Cinema Expanded By Go Hirasawa, January 2020 In the program, we would like to introduce five films, mainly by Japanese filmmakers and artists. However, despite the title Japanese Cinema Expanded, two of the films were shot in the US and one was shot in the US and Japan. The films cannot be captured within the regional framework of Japan. They provide a historical context for the cross-cutting experiments in film, art, and music in the same period, with Japan as a medium. We will introduce single-channel works, considering the concept of expanded cinema not only as a form of multi-projection and performance screening, but also as a cross-disciplinary film and moving-image expression. The program is also related to Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver’s intermedia masterpiece Cinematic illumination (1968–69) and the publication of Japanese Expanded Cinema and Intermedia: Critical Texts of the 1960s, edited by Julian Ross, Ann Adachi-Tasch, and myself at Archive Books in Germany. Cinematic Illumination was presented at Intermedia Art Festival in 1969, organized by musician Yasunao Tone, Takehisa Kosugi, and Chieko Shiomi. The work has been re-produced by Tokyo Photographic art museum in 2017, then MoMA in 2020, where it is installed until the end of February 2021. In discussions of the history of expanded cinema or intermedia in Japan, the narrative tends to be that they were introduced from the West in the early 1960s, starting with the underground cinema and Fluxus movements, and under their influence new homegrown works and movements emerged. Of course, such an idea is not wrong if you are referring to the terms expanded cinema and intermedia themselves.
    [Show full text]
  • Mieko Shiomi: Claiming the Self Through Action and Object
    Mieko Shiomi: Claiming the Self through Action and Object Connor Watson A hallmark of the Fluxus movement was to look for a hu- meaning in doing art.”1 What I would like to explore is how morous, sexual claim to the self through bodily, visceral Shiomi’s work encourages its viewers to enrich their lives, means. Mieko Shiomi seeks to psychologically reorient and the ways in which the artist goes about addressing the and claim the self through action, thus creating an aware- individual as well as the collective in her practice. ness of the three distinct relationships between the self and Shiomi was born into a moderately wealthy family nature; the self and the body; and the self and the other. in Tamashima, a small town near Okayama, Japan. Her fa- 42ARTICLES For Shiomi, the body and its various interactions with the ther was a choral conductor, and her mother regularly sang material environment around it are conduits through which classical songs to her. Shiomi began taking piano lessons awareness of these various psycho-sensorial relations can at nine years old and eventually became highly trained in UJAH be achieved. Rather than enacting the visceral being for classical music. With Okayama being subjected to air raids subversive means, Shiomi encourages an awareness of in the summer of 1945, her engagement with music was in- being by inciting the viewer of her works to enact creative, terrupted by the events of World War II. Her postwar effort individual, and bodily events. Her focus on individual ex- to learn music was strained by her having to share a piano perience and freedom sets her apart from more radical- with others, but nonetheless, she persisted.2 Another ave- ly inclined Fluxus artists such as George Maciunas, who nue of Shiomi’s artistic development was the natural world, sought awareness through collective action.
    [Show full text]